Sex-offender notification bulletins containing Mary Kay Letourneau’s photo have been sent to 1,000 homes in and around the Seattle suburb where the schoolteacher temptress has been living since her release from prison.
A weary-looking Letourneau posed for the photograph when she registered as a sex offender Aug. 4, 15 hours after she completed her 7 1/2-year sentence for seducing then-12-year-old sixth-grader Vili Fualaau.
Copies of the bulletin also have also been sent to officials of the Highline School District, which has three elementary schools in close proximity to Letourneau’s new digs in the exclusive Boulevard Park area.
“She’s pretty notorious around here, so parents already know how she looks,” noted Detective Christina Bartlett of the King County Sheriff’s Department, which sent out the notice.
The bulletin lists Letourneau’s crime as “rape of a child,” and classifies her as a Level II offender, which it describes as a “moderate risk to the community.”
The mailing invites parents and others concerned about Letourneau’s presence in the neighborhood to an
Aug. 25 meeting at the school district’s performing arts center, where they can ask questions about her and the sex-offender program.
Letourneau has been notified about the meeting and has a right to attend – but doesn’t have to, Bartlett said. The ex-con teacher’s photo and description – blonde, brown-eyed, 5-foot-6, and 115 pounds – also have also been posted on the Washington State Sex Offender Information Center’s Web site. She is one of 35 sex offenders, ranging from low-risk Level I to potentially high-risk Level III, living in the 98168 ZIP code, Bartlett said. Principals at the three area elementary schools will post the Letourneau bulletin when it’s received, for staffers to see, said district spokeswoman Catherine Rogers. It will not be duplicated and sent home to parents, she added.
Since her release, Letourneau has been living in nearseclusion with teacher friend Marvel Eldridge and her
husband and has not seen Fualaau, who is now 21 and last week successfully petitioned a court to vacate an
order barring contact between the two.
Some locals are horrified at how the relationship between Letourneau and Fualaau, who fathered two of his former teacher’s children, has been romanticized.
“The fact that people see this as a love story is outrageous and appalling,” DeAnn Yamamoto of the King
County Sexual Assault Resource Center recently told Seattle newspaper columnist Susan Paynter.